Kyoto Railway Museum

Kyoto Railway Museum is the museum about the history of Japanese
national railway.
It is located about 1.5 km west of Kyoto station.

Until 2015, it was "Umekoji Steam Locomotive Museum".
It was literally the museum of Japanese steam locomotives.
Many other historical marerials were added, so this new museum was
renewed in 2016.

This museum has main museum and semicircular garage of steam
locomotoves.
In main meseum, various historical vehicles of Japan are exhibited.
And semicircular garage is the former garage of steam locomotives which
arrived at and departed from Kyoto station.

Steam locomotives had run around Japan until the early 1970s.
In 1972, Japan National Railways opened this museum to protect the
disappearing steam locomotives as industrial properties.
In 1987, Japanese National Railways was split into seven railway
companies and privatized as the JR Group, and this museum is run by JR
West now.

Now this museum has 16 different kinds of 19 locomotives, and they had
been produced from 1914 to 1948.
Seven of them can run, even now. And two locomotives are sometimes used
for the trains of spcial events on JR Yamaguchi Line.

Umekoji was a former rail yard for locomotives, and has a roundhouse
and
a turntable.
All of the locomotives are set up there.
One of movable locomotives runs for about 1 km in the museum as a
little train.
(It is operated from 11:00 to 16:00. The running time is about 10
minutes. The name of the train is "SL-Steam-gou".)